Three Canadian professors recently penned an editorial in an influential academic journal arguing that teaching students STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) helps perpetuate "patriarchy," "heteronormativity" and other social ills.

While Higgins declined an interview to clarify, other academics have made similar arguments. Most notable is a University of Illinois academic, who argued that algebra and geometry skills perpetuate "unearned privilege" among white people.

In the recent essay, the Canadian professors go on to vaguely argue that STEM teaching is an "important site in which the movements of power occur, differentially (re)producing articulations of dominance."

"We need to challenge the mask of innocence and ask ourselves how relations of domination and subordination regulate encounters in classrooms," they argue, quoting Elizabeth McKinley, an early adopter of the social-justice-STEM-movement.

But there's hope for the future.

If STEM teachers adopt an explicitly "eco-social justice" stance, the oppression caused by STEM education might be disrupted. This stance can manifest in a variety of educational approaches professors might take.

Going forward, the professors hope that other STEM professors will take heed.

"For this work to refuse, resist, and resignify the field or STEM... requires critical mass, as well as creative acts of perception and practice: again, STEM education needs methodological disruption and displacement for the possibly of justice to-come."

This type of thinking about STEM being oppressive isn't new.

For example, last year, a group of American professors argued in a textbook that math classes are "inaccessible and oppressive" for students lacking the "privilege and power" of their teachers. There are countless other examples.

Comment: Champions of Identity Politics are actively seeking to 'disrupt' education and pretty much all cultural structures. You know things have become seriously bad when university professors are literally seeking to dumb down education in favor of a fanatical ideology.